Emails reveal Clinton aide gave foundation donors 'special' access, group says

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Newly released emails reveal more instances of the Clinton Foundation appearing to reach out to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s State Department for favors involving wealthy donors – including Crown Prince Salman of Bahrain – according to a watchdog group that fought to obtain the emails.

Judicial Watch, which released the documents Monday, said in a statement that the messages show Clinton aide Huma Abedin “provided influential Clinton Foundation donors special, expedited access to the secretary of state.” The documents include exchanges not previously turned over to the State Department.

The exchange involving the crown prince of Bahrain occurred in June 2009. It started with top foundation official Doug Band notifying Abedin that the crown prince was coming to the U.S. and seeking a meeting. He noted he is a “good friend of ours.”

Abedin wrote back that the crown prince had asked to see Clinton through “normal channels.”

She added: “I asked and she said she doesn’t want to commit to anything for thurs or fri until she knows how she will feel. Also she says that she may want to go to ny and doesn’t want to be committed to stuff in ny.”

Two days later, Abedin wrote to Band saying they were offering up a morning meeting between Clinton and the crown prince.

As noted by Judicial Watch, the foundation website says the crown prince made a commitment to his own international scholarship program in 2005, championed by the Clinton Global Initiative. According to the site, this commitment was worth $32 million, in addition to other reported donations from the Kingdom of Bahrain.

A statement released Monday by the court of the crown prince said his pledge "happened years before and was wholly unrelated to any meeting with Secretary Clinton.‎"

The Clinton campaign, though, pushed back on the Judicial Watch claims, pointing to the original Abedin email that said the crown prince went through “normal channels.”

"Once again this right-wing organization that has been going after the Clintons since the 1990s is distorting facts to make utterly false attacks,” spokesman Josh Schwerin said in a statement. “No matter how this group tries to mischaracterize these documents, the fact remains that Hillary Clinton never took action as Secretary of State because of donations to the Clinton Foundation."

The foundation, meanwhile, has tried to settle any conflict-of-interest questions by preparing a series of changes if Hillary Clinton is elected.

Following a foundation decision made public last week to no longer accept foreign or corporate donations if she wins, Bill Clinton issued a detailed memo Monday announcing other changes in the event his wife is elected president, including: He will step down from the board and “no longer raise funds for it;” the foundation’s international work funded by other government aid programs will be moved to other organizations; and he will step down from the board of the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI).

He also said the upcoming September annual meeting for the Clinton Global Initiative America “will be the last.”

In its statement on Monday, Judicial Watch highlighted several other exchanges that it claimed showed Abedin helping provide access to donors who had given anywhere from $25,000 to $10 million to the foundation.

The release Monday follows another email release earlier this month by Judicial Watch. One of those exchanges showed Band trying to put a wealthy foundation donor in touch with the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon.

Such emails have fueled accusations from Republicans of a “pay-to-play” operation. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump – Hillary Clinton’s rival in the 2016 race – on Monday called for the foundation to be shut down,

“It is now clear that the Clinton Foundation is the most corrupt enterprise in political history. What they were doing during Crooked Hillary’s time as Secretary of State was wrong then, and it is wrong now. It must be shut down immediately,” he said in a statement.

The Clinton campaign touted the foundation's contingency plans in hitting back at Trump’s call Monday.

"The Foundation has already laid out the unprecedented steps the charity will take if Hillary Clinton becomes president,” Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta said in a statement, making several demands of Trump in response:

“Donald Trump needs to come clean with voters about his complex network of for-profit businesses that are hundreds of millions of dollars in debt to big banks, including the state-owned Bank of China, and other business groups with ties to the Kremlin. Donald Trump should stop hiding behind fake excuses and release his tax returns and immediately disclose the full extent of his business interests. He must commit to fully divesting himself from all of his business conflicts to ensure that he is not letting his own financial interests affect decisions made by his potential administration."

More emails, meanwhile, are in the pipeline for release. A federal judge in a Judicial Watch case earlier Monday ordered the State Department to expedite its review of some 14,900 emails uncovered by the FBI over the course of its investigation into Clinton's private email practices.

Those emails are part of the larger cache of documents not previously disclosed by Clinton, and are in addition to the roughly 55,000 emails turned over to federal investigators.

Editor’s Note: The first sentence of paragraph seven of this article has been changed to: “As noted by Judicial Watch, the foundation website says the crown prince made a commitment to his own international scholarship program in 2005, championed by the Clinton Global Initiative.”

Fox News’ Catherine Herridge and Matthew Dean and FoxNews.com’s Judson Berger contributed to this report.